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or rather, on this unbelief-I have thought, and argued, and acted; till, for me, the lie has become a truth. The whole of my youth has been passed in fondling the wayward child in my arms-in gazing on his form, inhaling his breath, drinking in the light of his eyes, and the beauty of his aspect; and all the time I have been scoffing at his power, and even denying his existence. My punishment is at once the most appropriate and complete that could have been devised: it is this, that, for me, he has no power-for me he has ceased to exist.

The mistake I made was, that I began to be wise too early. "Will Cupid our mothers obey ?"-I set out with the determination to be a prudent and reasonable lover: for Reason and Prudence were ever the gods (I will not call them the goddesses) of my earthly idolatry; and they are so still, in the face of my bitter experience, and in despite of my better judgment. In order to make my love more available for the common purposes of life-more malleable-I have always contrived to mix up with it an alloy of worldly wisdom. By so doing, I thought to have produced a mixture that should be to the pure love of poetry and romance, exactly what Hall-marked gold is to the pure metal,—more capable of being worked up into articles of utility or ornament, and susceptible of a higher polish. But, even if I had succeeded in this, I forgot that I should, at best, have been possessed of a substance easy to be imitated, and liable to tarnish and change its colour. I now find, that by subjecting it to this process, I have necessarily destroyed its essential character, and made it neither love nor wisdom, but, on the contrary, a something not partaking of the qualities of either. The ingredients have been slowly and silently undergoing a chemical change; till at length the ethereal essence of the one has passed off in the form of an invisible vapour;-the cohesion of the other has been destroyed; and the residuum is a shapeless, colourless, tasteless caput

mortuum.

I have made this, to me, fatal discovery too late to repair, but not to repent of it; and there is still left me the forlorn hope of throwing myself at the foot of the CONFESSIONAL, and humbly and sincerely avowing that, unlike "the best of cut-throats," I have loved "too wisely, but not well." But let me leave reflections—which disturb my remaining peace in the exact proportion that they are apt and true, and precisely because they are so ;-and turn to the remembrance of facts and feelings which bring back the remembrance of that which is gone; -in most cases the next best thing to the reality.

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We are apt to say of any important event in our lives, I shall never forget when such a thing happened.' How should it be otherwise, when the past gives the whole form and substance to our being? For me the Past is every thing; the Present is nothing. And, as to the Future, it is, so to speak, less than nothing. I throw myself into the

Thy unimagined form as it should be.

The mind hath made thee, as it peoples heaven
Ever with its own desiring fantasy;

And to a thought such shape and substance given,

As haunts the unquenched soul, parch'd, wearied, wrung, and riven."

Ch. Harold, c. 4.

past, as into a sanctuary, forgetting all that is, and disregarding all that is to come!

And yet I tremble to approach the relation of this my first adventure in the enchanted region of Love. It is a vulgar error, to suppose that we necessarily take delight in recalling to the memory events which gave us delight as they were passing, but which are actually passed, and can never be renewed. The certainty that they are passed, and cannot return, more than neutralizes the pleasure the remembrance of them might otherwise bring to us: it changes the phantom of joy into a mockery of it. This was well known to one who looked more deeply into the dungeons of the human heart than any other modern has done: and it has been tacitly acknowledged by a living writer somewhat similar in habits of feeling, and whose authority is of great weight in such matters.

Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella miseria."

Infer. c. 5. Quoted in Corsair. What greater pain

Than thinking upon happiness gone by

In the midst of grief?

Such are the words the mighty poet of the Inferno puts into the mouth of his gentle Francesca, when she is called upon to relate the story of her love to tell the brief tale of her past happiness, while she is pining and withering away in penal fires. Mark, too, the effect even on the poet himself, mere spectator as he is, and “ one, albeit, unused to the melting mood:"—

"Mentre che l' uno spirto questo,
L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade
I' venni men così, com' io morisse :
E caddi, come corpo morto cade."
While one of these sad spirits thus discoursed,
The other wept so, that from very pity,
A death-like faintness seized me, and I fell
Prone to the earth, as a dead body falls.

A less deep insight into the secret places of the human heart, would have induced the poet to invest the lips of his lovers with a momentary smile, at the imaginary renewal of their loves.

It is true that, by means of a healthful, active, and well-disciplined imagination, we may in some measure re-create, and enjoy over again past pleasures, provided the heart that is to be thus acted on by the imagination be not thoroughly worn and withered; because, what once has been, can never entirely cease to be. But, if the heart be utterly blighted, then, like the spirits of the damned, it is susceptible of pain alone; and the imagination becomes a curse, greater or less, in proportion to its activity and its power. If it can place before its victim a picture more or less vivid of past bliss, it is only to call to his recollection what has been his :-if it can "shew his eyes," it is only to "grieve his heart."

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But to my task. I stand shivering on the edge of my story, when I should plunge fearlessly in, and let its stream bear me onward, steed that knows its rider." The penitent, who willingly presents

as a

himself at the CONFESSIONAL, must not deliberate, or he is lost.-But, in order that these Confessions may not be so many tales" signifying nothing," that they may not be without a moral-it must be borne in mind that they are passages in the life of one who, though love has been the breath and food of his intellectual existence, has all along fallen into the fatal error of loving, as he said in the outset, "too wisely, but not well," of one who sought to control that, the essence of which is to be incontrollable; to command that which was made to command; to bind that which is nothing if not free; to capitulate with that which will be obeyed: in short, of one who has treated love like a child, because he looks like one; forgetting, or neglecting to discover till it was too late, that he is—a god!

Prudence is a cardinal virtue in all affairs-except those of love; and there it is a cardinal vice-the worst of all, because it bears the outward aspect of a virtue. Four several times have I essayed to enter the Paradise of Love, linked arm-in-arm with this same worldlyminded Prudence, disguised under different habits; and each time the seraph who guards the entrance has laughed to scorn my companion, and turned from me silently, and with a look of pity, mixed each time with an increased degree of contempt. A fifth time—after wandering alone about the confines, seeking in vain for an entrance, till my feet were as weary as the pilgrim's who has just reached the shrine of his saint; but, unlike him, with my hopes deferred instead of accomplished;―at last I saw a gate suddenly open of itself to receive me, and heard the voices of a host of unseen seraphs inviting me to enter. But again I paused—again I pondéred, debated, deliberated, and-was lost! for, before I could determine, the gate had closed, as it had opened, suddenly, and of itself; the voices changed their singing into shouts of laughter; and I felt at once that I was alone, and without hope, and that I deserved to be so. Before I turned away, to quit the spot for ever, I saw, in a niche beside the portal which had just closed itself upon me, a sculptured image of the god. It seemed instinct with life and motion, and did not frown at me, as I gazed upon it. I approached the beautiful figure-took it in my arms-clasped it to my breast, and, perchance, shed tears over it; but, as I did so, my touch seemed to change it into ice, and it struck a mortal coldness to my heart, which has never left it since!

Again I am wandering from my task. I must turn to it abruptly, and at once, or I shall go "about it and about it" for ever, and to no purpose. Love is no respecter of persons. When I had left school "for good," as the phrase is, (and it is a phrase most "german to the matter" in this case, at least as it respects me,) I was fifteen years of age. At this time there lived, in a court near my father's house, a female fortune-teller.-The reader is mistaken in supposing that I am about to relate my having gone thither to consult her on my future destiny. Young as I was, Reason (twin sister to Prudence, and sworn foe to LOVE,) was already the goddess of my idolatry. I had exactly as much contempt for whatever could not be reduced to her principles, as I ought to have had respect for it on that very account, if I would fain have made myself a worthy and acceptable servant in the court of the baby monarch. There are times and circumstances in which reason is the worst of folly; but in the affairs of which I am now about to

treat, reason is worse than folly-it is crime.-This fortune-teller, who lived in a court near my father's house-(I love to speak of the place, as I do to pass through it, to this day, though I have never any business there) this fortune-teller had a beautiful daughter;-stately as an Indian palm-tree-graceful as the branches of a wind-swept willow with an oval Greek face-eyes like the morning—oh! I have often thought since, if I had but devoted a tithe of the time to the mother that I did to the daughter, I might have been happy! she would have gifted me with faith, perhaps; and faith is as needful in love as it is in animal magnetism; there is no good to be done or suffered in either without it. Perhaps, too, she would have proved to me that the stars had destined me for her daughter; which, in truth, I now begin to think they did, for I have never since penetrated so near to the real El Dorado. I might then be said to inhabit that narrow slip of "debateable ground" which surrounds the domains of Love on every side, and separates it from the Great Desert which forms the remainder of the intellectual world.

The fortune-teller's daughter was several years older than I was. He who is really capable of feeling the passion of love, is sure to begin by loving a woman older than himself. Incipient lovers may write this down in their commonplace-books as an axiom. All my readers, except these latter, (and I can reckon on but few of them) would grow impatient if I were to detail the various stratagems I put in practice, to attract the attention and gain the acquaintance of the beautiful Nancy L. Suffice it that I waited and waited, and watched and watched, night after night, and week after week, of one of those long dreary winters that we used to have then, only to get a sight of her at the window, which looked up an angle the court made just at the point where her mother's house was situated-or to pronounce her name" Nancy!" as she flitted by me on some errand. She soon knew me for what I was; for when did a woman not know the meaning written in a lover's look? And she never passed me without a smile of recognition; for when did a woman frown on a lover of fifteen? But she did pass me; for I had never hitherto mustered up courage enough to speak to her. At last, one bitter cold January evening,-(I think we never have such Januaries now-even the seasons themselves have changed-or, is it that they, and every thing else, do but seem to change; while it is we ourselves who change, as" the years bring on the inevitable yoke ?")-one bitter January evening, as she was passing by me rather more deliberately than usual, and, as I thought, with even a more than usually graceful and gracious smile upon her fine imaginative countenance,-I took hold of her arm gently, and she stopped!-I trembled, smiled, and said nothing; but slowly transferred my hold from her arm to her hand-her bare hand, -for she never wore gloves, except on Sundays. The magic influence of that touch thrills through me as I write, and awakens my torpid sensibilities into life-"even now, after long seeming dead." the mother could have conjured with only half the power that the daughter did, she would not have been taken to Union-hall, as a cheat and impostor-as I remember she was shortly after the time of which I am now speaking! Her hand (Nancy's) was as hard as horn, -for she did all the work of their little household and as cold as VOL. IV. NO. XVI.

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ice; but its touch turned my blood into liquid flame, and dispersed to the winds, that came whistling by us, all the eloquence I had for months past been meditating for this long-sought occasion: I could not utter a word.--" Well," she said,--still smilingly, and without the slightest appearance of anger or confusion,-" Well--what do you want with me?"-In reply, I could only ask her- "where she was going?" This was an unlucky question; for it reminded her of what she seemed to have forgotten; and, with another smile, she took her hand away from me, and was gone in a moment, into a shop close by. I of course waited till she returned; and, the spell being now broken, I spoke to her again, asking her to "come and take a walk with me." She smiled, shook her head, and again whisked away, leaving me fixed to the spot, in a trance of mingled surprise and happiness. I had spoken to her! touched her! heard the sound of her voice addressed in kindness to me! and the world, for any thing I cared to the contrary, might now be at an end; for, steeped as I was in the very fulness of waking bliss, if I did not think, I at least felt, that "if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy."--Why was it not so? I was innocent then; and how can innocence be more richly and appropriately blessed than to be permitted to die in the lap of delight?-Even the " gentle" reader, unless he has been in love at the age of fifteen, can have no notion of the fulness, the absolute fruition, of deep and It seemed that I had quiet delight, which this interview brought me. nothing more to do with either hope or fear-that I was beyond the reach of harm or accident-in short, that the end and object of my existence was accomplished: and, without waiting or watching at the window any longer, I went straight home, and slept a whole long night of dreamless sleep,-which I had not done before for many months.

Lovers of five-and-twenty, of both sexes, will smile at the limited nature of my hopes and wishes; and the good-natured among them will think, that, if I was so easily to be made happy, it was a pity I should be miserable. They are right: it was a pity. So thought the -; and she treated me kind-hearted and good-natured Nancy L

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accordingly. It is thus that women bring into play their natural dispositions to be the creators of nothing but delight. To love and be beloved is at once the duty, the business, and the pleasure of their lives; but an intuitive sense of what it is fitting they should be, and should appear to be, under any given circumstances, teaches them that, in the present state of society, they must, to such of their lovers as are arrived at years of discretion," be coy and cruel: but, when they are so, it is "only to be kind." Even while the stream of their affection is thus artificially dammed up at one of its natural outlets, it eagerly seeks for another; and accordingly, you will see a woman— who would die rather than bestow even a smile on a man-lover of fiveand-twenty-lavishing on a boy of fifteen, whose brain and blood are consuming themselves away with passion for her, "o dolci baci, o When the "Bella Età cosa altra più cara." This is as it should be. del oro" shall return, this may be safely changed; but, till then, women know what is best for themselves, and for us too.

But my story is standing still again. It lingers round this period as the bee does round its favourite flower, when it is far from home, and feels that the rain-clouds are gathering over-head. ·

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